Guest Blogger: Dan McCleary - Page 2

Carrie Linquist of Memphis was the first reader last week to let me know Sullivan's Shakespeare-text request of me. Caliban speaks it in The Tempest as the drunken Stephano and Trinculo attempt to sing: 'That's not the tune!'

I have never been in the habit of speaking Shakespeare's text on purpose in my everyday life. Of course, we all use his creations daily, but often only in the natural course of conversation.a

Tennessee Shakespeare Company is budgeted to earn approximately 42% of its season's income this year. The balance is conservatively projected to come from contributing sources such as corporations, grants, foundations, and individuals. This percentage is in line with the non-profit national average, and in fact for our classical corner of the industry, TSC's earned income ratio is slightly higher.

Music has always played the role of Muse for me as a stage director. Occasionally, when I am stuck creatively or wanting to be around the actors in the rehearsal room or need to assistance in focusing, I will play the same piece of music over and over. I have meditated on Dvorak when considering the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West in Vita & Virginia, on Bach's cello concertos when considering Julius Caesar, on Bartok when constructing A Midsummer Night's Dream, Zoe Keating for The Tempest, Rachmaninoff for Hamlet, and many others.

Today is my dad's birthday. As a father myself now, I think of him daily and nightly as I have my hands full with twin three-year-old boys and running a theatre company. I mostly consider how often he went without being thanked by me when I was a child. He did an awful lot I am thankful for now.

On February 7, The Commercial Appeal reported that two Tennessee state senators had filed a bill that would shield individuals, businesses, and other entities from lawsuits or other sanctions for refusing services and goods to same-sex couples "if doing so would violate (their) sincerely held religious beliefs."

Pete Seeger died last Monday at age 94. He was and remains a champion of social change.

In the aftermath of the massacre of children in Connecticut in December 2012, I found myself mesmerized watching Executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association Wayne LaPierre on "Meet the Press." I remember the horror I felt, as he struggled to articulate his defense, as he interrupted with his solution to violence in our schools: "More guns." He said arming adults in U.S. schools was the answer to decreasing future violence in U.S. schools. Here, I thought, was the perfect, tragic embodiment of our country's need to teach our children Romeo and Juliet differently. Five children end up dead in that story and they were likely whisked there due to their parents' foundationless rage.

Celebrated and criticized writer-activist Amiri Baraka died at age 79 on January 9. When I first read his poetry his name was LeRoi Jones (his birth name). I came to him through reading early literary heroes, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, birthers of a literary and cultural movement that welcomed Mr. Baraka into their wide fold. He in turn published some of their work, later penning controversial plays and helping lead the Black Nationalist movement.

For those of us who spend much our days raising funds to produce live theatre, we are intimate with the competition for those funds from individuals, governments, foundations, and corporations.

For the past 22 years, one of the personal on-stage inspirations and models, perhaps the singular of these, has been Mark Rylance. I am hardly alone in feeling this way. Mark is world-renowned and a multi-award winner, though I don't imagine he puts much stock in such things.

I founded Tennessee Shakespeare Company in my hometown of Memphis in 2008 following many years of working as a stage actor, director, artist-manager, primarily in New England. I was personally and professionally compelled to found TSC, and I spent half a year researching and creating a strategic seven-year plan. This gave birth to the Mid-South's only professional, classical theatre. But we quickly outpaced our seven years. We also encountered all manner of unforeseen obstacles, surprises, and even set-backs, which, the further I get from them, the more intriguing they become (as opposed to just harrowing).

Actor Cherry Jones, always deeply affecting on stage in over 20 years of work in which I have seen her, has an uncanny ability to include her audience regardless of whether or not the play requests it. . . . Regardless of the size of the house, in everything she does on stage she breathes in the audience and exhales us back into our seats, changed.